The title of my book is why teach in defense for a real education. That is a really hard question i would like to put on the shelf for a while. But in defense for a real education, thats why i want to try to work with a little bit. So let me ask this question what is this thing a real education . And i want to say against the disposition of the culture at large a lot of fellow scholars from the university of this point it is humanities based. The real the education is a humanities based education. Why . First of all the humanities based education is conducive to the development of citizens. Conducive to the development of citizens. Our founder Thomas Jefferson wanted to create a university that would help people become citizens independent republic. Its one of the reasons he brought us the university of virginia and one of the reasons we are here. It seems to me that there is no better preparation for becoming a citizen for the United States of america or citizen of the world than a humanities education. In the humanities we learn to express ourselves with clarity. We learn to write well and speak reasonably well. We learn to defend our positions and to take in the positions of other individuals. We learn to listen to them which is almost as much an art and maybe even more than the art of expressing ones self. We learn to render their arguments fairly, reproduce their arguments judiciously and then respond to them in a constructive and humane way. This is at the heart of citizenship it seems to me, and the education to humanities is conducive to this kind of human development. In order to be an effective citizen, it seems to me you also must command knowledge. You must command among other things the knowledge of history, command the knowledge of history. I talked to a lot of High School Students and High School Teachers and one of the things they frequently tell me is that until the u. S. History course is wonderful, they ran out of time at the end of the year just before they got to vietnam. I think thats not a good thing. And it strikes me that the iraq war may have something to do with it. You should study history to be a good citizen and study history all the way through to the presence as far as you can and need to know about religion, christianity and american christianity to be sure. You need to know something about judeas some within the current world coming nothing about islam isnt acceptable. Learn something about hindu and buddhism, have a sense of what most people build their lives around. Its absolutely critical to understanding them, sympathizing with them and being an effective citizen of this that is now becoming more and more a global kind of environment. So it seems to me that jefferson is entirely right to have created a university that is devoted to to citizenship. We in the humanities can help develop the citizens in ways that people dare i say in the Sciences Like my Apple Computer im glad ive got a polio vaccine. But nonetheless, nonetheless, we are in the position to do this. Its a particularly rich acquisition and it seems to me that it is worth in itself the only justification for the humanities the would be enough. Though we do more than that as well. We in the humanities help our students and help ourselves to do what socrates said we ought to do and that is quite simply to know ourselves. At the humanities are for the students what they like to call the great Second Chance. That is we all get socialized one time by our parents and teachers and by our religious instructors and we learn who is they think we are in for a while who we think we are. We learned about the world is, whats valuable, whats not valuable and how we ought to leave our lives. By the time youre 17yearsold weve been described multiple times by multiple people and those descriptions may or may not be accurate. But when you go to college and you get to study the humanities, you get what i would call the great Second Chance. You get to find out of those things that you have been asked to tell you are conditioned to value really are valuable or not. After you have read plato and thought about what justice and truth is and beauty or True Religion is, with the best kind of life might be coming your than in the position to evaluate your own life and youre own commitment and may be based on that evaluation to change to it may be based upon the devaluation to change. This is one of the greatest gift the world provides. The possibility of knowing ourselves and deciding who we thought we have been up until this point really is true for us over some kind of new trash description to be the order of the day. The process of self knowledge can be conducive to success in the world, too. But a lot of people who of difficulty succeeding in this world have difficulty because they are trying to pound a rail and round self into a square peg. They go into a wall when their heart is a Kindergarten Teacher come to grow up to the Kindergarten Teacher when their heart they are a wonderfully lyrical poet and its hard for them. Somebody whos studied and has had a great Second Chance has had the opportunity to see what he or she really values. And based upon that, to connect to a profession the becomes more than a profession. It becomes a vocation. Really bringing vocation is relatively easy because the work is a form of recreation. The work is a form of play. Most jobs work as a form of work. And you will have to slug it out very hard if you are not in the place where you need to be in order to realize that particular destiny that is latent in side of. Now, this sounds like a deal talking to the board of directors saying this is why the humanities are better because we create more successful students because they know themselves. It would be nice to see this to the various boards of directors by dont think it is entirely true. What i think is true is this, this opportunity to no ones self involves putting every single believe that we have if we are daring enough to do so into question. Putting all of our beliefs into question that includes the believe in religion and politics and families but it also includes the believe in success and said that after you have red who commands a life of a voluntary poverty and nature and art and you have decided that what he says is in some measure of truth, you walk away from the conventional success to the horror of some part of yourself and embrace something that is entirely different so there is a danger but i think it is a good danger of calling into question every single fundamental value with which we are socialized at the beginning of our lives. It is not necessarily so that the humanities will make you more of a success unless that is when you want. You may reject success based upon what youve learned as a humanities. Now how does this process took place . This takes place in many different ways. But one of them is being open to influence. The student comes to college and he or she reads and a certain point in a moment the classical figure this of reading and writing described so brilliantly very simply you are reading something, you are hearing something and suddenly it is as though you have created that which you are only here. Suddenly it is as though you have created what you are hearing and that is the moment when you say thats it. That is oddly enough what i believe. Now just to give you a quick example, one of the patron saints strangely enough since jefferson is the founder, one of the patrons is none other than edgar allan poe. Now everyone that has led him even if you havent know that if any stories of these lead to rest 6 feet underground at 10 00 in the morning, by 2 00 the next morning that person will be up and slamming hard at the door. Nothing in him ever stays buried. The past reaches out in the bony scales and cold hands and grabs you on the shoulder and effectively says i claim you. People read him with a sense of recognition. The past is never passed. Faulkner suggested a number of times and many people have this conviction when they see it realized it is a time of debate could have a less nightmare and they say thats it. Thats how it is and they learn something about themselves in that moment. What they do in that knowledge is another matter or they read ralf Ralf Emmerson the can be worked out of the imagination and the extemporizing mind. The act of writing can teach about your commitments to the past helped to create yourself a new. And within this possibility of the self creation. He broached to the past, present and to come there is no history to the only biography. In other words there are no determines. Its just you. Do your thing and i will know you. Some students read that with utter revulsion. Robert ted warren says he can only believe him when hes traveling 8,000 feet above the surface of the earth and even then he finds it a little bit beside the point. But there are others that read emerson and hear the clarion call and say within the instant why not the creators and i want to break loose from the past and believe in this complete self of invention. Once youve had that experience, i could have created that. That is a saying in spite of myself and then you have to figure out what to do with it. But that it seems to me is a moment of humanistic influence from which an individual young or old has a positive that the of growing. It allows him to know himself and allows her to know herself more truly than a moment ago. Its a wonderful moment in self knowledge. But self knowledge isnt the only gift and citizenship isnt the only gift. Theres also the simple gift of knowing the other. One of the phrases im proud of and i like a little quick phrases in why teach is this. A real reading i said in a moment of what i take to be his reincarnation. Real reading is reincarnation. By which i mean that certain forms of reading that dont involve the dynamics, certain forms of reading are the equivalent of being reborn as another person. You are reborn as Emily Dickinson and experience with her struggles with god you are reborn as walt whitman and experienced to attempt to struggle with nothing at all but to accept everything that he sees. You walk down the road with walt whitman and your mind is in march and your spirit is in march and youre sympathetic imagination and capacity to be another person is also enlarged. This is a spectacular gift and it is available not exclusively in the humanities, but it seems to me words have a certain magic that allow this to happen in amazing ways. Its hard to explain why that is so theres an in one nest and a community about the reading that allows for this kind of a sympathetic imagination. And i think i have to admit its rather wonderful. Another thing that the humanities get and we were just catching on in a moment ago. Another gift of the humanities get is very simple. I start with genex in the locomotive moment feeling deterministic and feeling the way of some force that reaches out its hand and controls. It says language speaks man to which i want to say it speaks some people but not all of them. Some people go around speeding business speak, sports, political and the effectively take the roots. To quote concord because they have not capitalized for that which they are expressing. Somebody who is not spoken by language but speaks language stands in a different relationship to work. He or she is able to express feelings that prize deep within the spirit, is able to put forward its own vision of the world come able to say what it is she wants with some clarity, is able to appreciate and may be summarized with someone else with that other person might want. So the use of language and the ability to inflict with your own interpretation of the world puts you in a place you can actually live rightfully. If you cant describe the world in terms of your own, its going to be hard to navigate because of the terrain that you see will be effectively someone else. Language, acquisition, through the study of the masters of language, the participants gives people a freedom in life that is difficult to obtain through any of the means. They can express themselves. It has got some heart in it. Citizenship coming the other language. One last thing i want to mention and i suppose it is a little bit for me than that we are friends and i hope but its quite simply pleasure. You have to live in your own head, think your own thoughts, be with yourself. And to the degree that you can appreciate the literary art and to the degree that you can appreciate fine art you live in the half year and a brighter and a more joyful place. There is just a sense of loving these kind of activities and that being a love of itself. If i live long enough and who knows, i would like to write a book called the metaphysics of the hangover. But if you think about hangovers we all know that they come from inebriation, toxicity. But it also it seems to me they come from certain kinds of entertainment, from watching the tv shows you leave it with a headache as though you have been intoxicated for a little while but then you come back down to earth. Real literature and art which is both difficult, challenging, dark and uplifting it makes you feel uplifted and reasonably happy. I spent the day running around reading in between errands. It made me feel pretty darn good be watching for that book. [laughter] so this is my thought about the real education. How are we doing in terms of providing real education . We need to up hour game just a little bit. I think it would be helpful if those of us that teach the humanities began to think of ourselves just a little bit more as teachers and less as scholars or founders. But affectionate. It seems as though the best thing we can do is to gather what has been known and preserve it and pass it on so far as we can to the future generations. I think we should back off a little bit but not completely on our professional lives and speaking our own private languages and on trying to work out the most sophisticated form of interpretation and take ourselves to be just a little bit more teachers not only to our students but also to the general public who is dying to know the kind of things we knew to be introduced to them. Just imagine what its like if youre outside of the Literary Academy and you have some curiosity. Where do i begin, what do i read, with shakespeare is the best. We know there are things that the hour fingers in so far as respect to people we spread what seems to me to the liberation. Im not saying that there are not wonderful difficult works out there. I admire them, but then that lives up to the difficulty of their idiom. How often is the level of inside not succeeded in living up to the difficulty of our idiom . How often would it makes sense to be a little bit more available and a little bit less professional . The other thing i think we might consider giving is posing the question of believe. Ive spent the summer talking to lots of colleagues in various disciplines. And i ask them it can down to a fundamental question. Do you care about what your students believe when the course is over . That this do you teach in order to give students the opportunity to change their mind . Generally, the answer was no. Thats too much like brainwash, people said. Thats to propagandistic. One teacher and particularly said we are shy. We dont like to assert ourselves in this particular way. But it seems to me that once we have given people the skills to read and understand the come to read and understand emmerson koret Emily Dickinson we should take the next step and ask them if in fact it is true. Ask them if in fact it is true what would it mean to live this out . Might you believe it . It seems to me that history needs to hear about the acquisition of the fact, develop and historical narrative, the awareness of the complexities of global configuration, but all tightly the question probably that needs to be asked as to what degree will to be an actor historical the and to what degree an interpreter of history. This isnt always or twice if you are in a small southern town in 1960 you may have thought youd be an observer of history that there are some people who havent voted for a while and decided it was their time to do some voting and you expressed it in the middle of history that many of us in the position we find ourselves at each place as to whether it will be historical actors or historical observers. There are still great causes out there and the student interested in history like all of us is well served by asking himself or herself willing be a participant . Well i join in with whatever force is at my disposal to make history . Even if it is any small way. The religious studies student should ask what will i believe . Not just what is hinduism and buddhism, fascinating questions. Ive been studying hindu for the last ten years and have no idea what it is which makes it wonderful from my point of view. I asked them what is this and they just said come in, relax have fun. [laughter] how many gods do you have . Who knows. [laughter] i loved it. The question isnt just what is buddhism and christianity but what does it mean . Is that a live option for you . What would you believe . The philosophers, there are people who are among the most brilliant people in the universities. I said to you ask them if what plato said is true . Sometimes they say they are not ready for it yet. They arent ready to go out and fight for the country. Ready to get married and have children but not ready to asked if he has a part in justice. It is as though we humanists have given our students a beautiful piece of cloth, beautifully textured, put it on their desks and said to them if you want to make a jacket out of it, go ahead, i dont care. Say to them how would you make something out of that . Said, posing the question of belief in a detached, friendly, kindly, skeptical but also supportive way seems to me a crucial in the process of the true humanistic education and i think we should be willing to do a little bit more. So, if a real education is humanistic i have set a couple words about how we might improve. How might society improve . How is the society doing in terms of endorsing a real education . Welcoming you know what society says at large. Its very simple. The society says it is too expensive. It costs too much. To which something inside of me and it seems to me here today wants to say this. We have the money to have two and a half Million People in jail. We have the money to fight three wars simultaneously around the globe. We have the money to allow people like a certain individual recently ran for president to 15 of his taxes, despite the fact that he makes millions every year. We have enough money to suspend taxes for him, but we dont have enough money to support humanities . Given that they create citizens and self knowledge and they can be conducive to success or not, we have money for those things, but we dont have money for the humanities . To. 5 Million People in jail many from my point of view that are legitimately based upon what seems to be unconstitutional. Dhaka camaguey when there. 2. 5 Million People in jail, some of them on mandatory sentences after three strikes. 160,000 per year to have an individual in jail the New York Times told me the other day. That is three harvard tuitions that means we are spending aye isnt good about 7. 5 Million People to harvard every year but we cant afford humanities education, right . We can fight for the wars anywhere in the world, but we cant afford humanities education. I dont know if you saw this in the paper, not long ago there were a couple guys making fake ids. A couple of guys making fake ids. Malae not in favor of people making fake ids. I promise you kidding if they need to apprehend those guys. Did you see what they used . They used an armored car. An armored car on the streets, right . Thats what we need to spend our money on. Armored cars to apprehend guys that are making fake ids. Somebody grew pot plants in his backyard and somebody came down in a helicopter to get the plants to get im not in favor of unlimited proliferation of drugs to be im not in favor of false ids but it seems we are using a sledgehammer to hit something thats pretty small here. We can afford that but we cant afford to subsidize the humanities. It seems to me that we cant not afford to subsidize the humanities. The commitment that states have made to the large state institutions is falling constantly and tax payers and legislators voted for the war and a jail and general freedom from taxes at the expense of education. And if you have somebody there was more intimately involved in these issues than i am you might sometimes tell them so. We created a class of People Better so rich a function like small governments and of themselves but an individual decided on his own quite recently that he was going to eradicate polio. Im all for your eradicating polio. Im glad that bill gates wants to do that but should an individual have so much money they can act as a government in and of themselves . Should they have so much money that when they have an idea to major the university of virginia they can go like this and create one . Come competitive studies may be a good thing. A Leadership School may be a good thing. But those are the present participants of equal distribution of wealth. We cant afford the humanities or the faculty to determine what the students to determine. I have a considerable doubt about that. This education need to cost less . I think that it does. I think that it does. I think we need to do everything that we can to make the school lessexpensive for our students. However, whenever the question of money comes up, the general public says whispers in my year any way things like we should get rid of the underperforming department. We should get rid of classics in german. Never on the table was the possibility of considering our relationship to our athletic programs. Now i love cavaliers football. I never miss a game [laughter] we didnt beat oregon . At the end of the year we will be ready. Right . I know that but i dont know that our students need to subsidize my masculine compensatory fantasies. I get the National Football league to supply that for me. They used to say that sports paid for themselves. The Richmond Times dispatch told me the other week for on the contrary, students pay for sports. 12 of their tuition money goes to maintaining first the sports teams. A loved the sports teams that we could do without them. We could at least put on the table a different relationship to them. Also i think as colleges we need to stop creating retirement spreads to compete with other colleges creating the retirement spreads. Five kinds of a regular. This seems a little bit extreme. We should cut back just a tad. We should consider cutting back. We do not need a new workout facility every few minutes. I have a little bit of an anonymous against squash. If you put me in 1i would be treading on my feet but we spent 42 billion on a new squash for somebody they would say it came from another source. I dont know. I dont know. I mean, how are we spending our money . Thats important, too. Professors need to take this seriously. We need to talk about teaching loads. All of those things need to be on the table but the need to be on the table besides the courts and the football teams and the other issues that naturally arises when we are talking about money. But also dare i say it has to do something about the student loan situation and we have to do this collectively. They are leaving the service and we have got to do something to help them. We have got to look at the plans by people like obama and the senator from massachusetts where there is some sense we might have students paying a portion of the money after they have graduated so as to satisfy their loans. Their kids now lying in to 150,000 other debt that the interest is accruing and accumulating. There is no capacity to declare bankruptcy and they are being turned into slaves were separated from their dreams by extraordinary weight of debt. Some of them made foolish decisions. About an 18yearold foolish decision should be at least reconsider double it seems to me and we should help do that with all the money were spending by cutting back rather than three. Youd be surprised how much would come back in our direction and that isnt enough for me. I dont know why. So, all of these things i think need to be addressed in terms of the social relationship to education. German and classics. Lets talk also about not just germany and classics. I want to say again, a real education is humanities based. I always admire people and they get a chance to talk to unlawfully audience like yourself and the media cameras rolling they put their arm forward and say i called on president obama. Im not that sort of person but if i were that kind of person i would say that i require a professorial indolent voice. I think its all the better education. Now i have not finished president obamas to all the biographies. They are a little bit on the seaside i have to tell you. But the show the mind of an individual who has learned how to think by having one of the best educations in the world provides. Obama thinks. He will take one side of an argument, the argument for abortion, he will push it as far as it can go. He will take the other side of the argument against abortion and help push it as far as it will go and then try to find a synthesis between the two. He does it very effectively in those books while what is not the most enlightening reading you will find but its that kind that is very active and he didnt learn to do that on his own. He wasnt born with the dialect capacity. He loved that. He learned how to express his feelings which he can do brilliantly. He learned how to analyze situations and how to become a citizen and something about the interior lives of others which i would wish he had more access to never has he mentioned the 2. 5 people to. 5 Million People in prison. When he gets the chance to talk of education he talks on the dow jones, the economy, prosperity. That is the range of his powers of description and analysis on this issue so he stands in front of us one of the proudest prospects of the humanities education broadly speaking that one could ever imagine. I would like to hear us talk differently the humanities help us know ourselves and no others. They give us a capacity to speak language and they also give us pleasure and occasionally a good time. I hope this at least hasnt been a bad time. Thank you. [applause] to questions and observations. They are waiting for you here and america is, too. The part of america that watches cspan on a saturday afternoon. [laughter] [inaudible] rewarding a number of people that go to class that dont have enough people or enough money so how do you let the consumer decide what is important and whats being taught at the universities. Im not deeply enough a acquainted. I am out of my circumference i talk about things like the budget. Any budget or political issues. Ask me about emmerson. But i would say that if the new budget model does support people for putting the bottoms in seats i know how to put a lot of bottoms and seats. No homework or reading. So, like how do you stop that juggernaut from Going Forward . We in english give out eight losses. Reavis studies has invented the a plus plus. Homework . No, watch the film strips. I dont see how one gets out of that particular corner when the competition becomes fierce, we will become more responsive to the consumerist kinds of needs unless there is some other factor in the equation that i do not know about it is there as far as you know. You see a lot for science and engineering and technology and a lot less humanities based. I think it may be that the sciences can be up to a certain point very effectively taught online so they can move all of that and in the humanities need somebody to talk to about these things pitting it if the question is what plato says right we need another human being to have an exchange about and that human being should be a little older if not a little wiser and more experienced and maybe a little more ironic about certain kind of things so you need that exchange. You dont need someone to be ironic about the equation. There it is. As a, you know, maybe they should all go on line and we can have the whole university. That doesnt seem to be the way things are going. Ive been a student at this stage for quite awhile. Ive read the majority of your work with great pleasure. It seems to me that you are taking a shift and you are not just writing good literature, good stories and good biographies, but youre also now challenging us a bit more. Is that true and if so, why and how does this happen . It is a book that has a lot of arguments a net. I hope [inaudible] its somewhat of a high hard to the book and a good humored and the ideal english major is everyone should at least consider being an english major and probably should be an english major. Every one that seems to read this takes me literally on behalf of economics and philosophy and i was just kidding. [laughter] i was just kidding. So, its another mode of my engagement with these questions. My favorite kind of writing to do and mode of engagement is one that combines the analytical. I believe people and they tell me their stories. So in this book i try to talk about sports and my relationship and i didnt even explode i just spindled so i like to think about my own experience and teaching and sports in regards to music and then fled the reflections through that one. There are some pieces that are just reflection based which involve a certain amount of self analysis and i hope persuasive self criticism. Thats my favorite on the next budget which is on football above all things. It will be a combination of those. They keep asking the Budget Department to let me hang out with the team for a while and after this i think that may be postponed. But i do believe that we could beat oregon by the end of the year. I think we are reaching quite a new point in the teaching of humanities. And i guess my impression is hasnt it always been that certainly for the large part of our history, the devotee for students to go out and learn the classics and how to explore themselves has been limited to a very small percent in the last couple of generations weve sort of given lip service but its sort of like we tolerated only as long as it doesnt get out of hand and weve always had this problem that in academia so is this new or just a different phase of the struggle . I think youre quite right that its a constant dialogue. It seems to me this is a really good occasion to push by even further than the other direction and say a mechanic, carpenter, a waiter or waitress has as much right to contemplate what he is going to value has a rich kid. I had no interest until wall or money he said we just dont have any money. So off we went in that particular direction. So i think it is an opportunity to expand and fight back. But i think thats right. And i think that, you know, part of the difficulty of the humanities and of this process of self scrutiny or self discovery or whatever you might want to call that is that even on some level it would not. They would just rather buy into the pieties, get a job, make money and not think much about it because we cant bear very much reality and what gets exposed in the humanities is the dark side, the challenging side and i think thats difficult and we want to close ourselves off against and if we can even to a certain point it is tremendously productive because we live with more sympathy, more compassion, awareness and we are better able to scope a little way that there is no doubt about the fact that, you know, there is a comfortable side of just saying im going to do what im supposed to do and take it from there. Some people are told with years of custody and it goes okay but a lot of peoples lives blow up in front of them because of doing what they are supposed to do pivoted doesnt mean they dont blow up in front of us even when we know something about ourselves but i think they blow up in a different way for people that havent taken that trip of self awareness. At least thats kind of what keeps me going in the game. You are quite right is a lovely occasion when a bunch of people come out and say that humanities are dying and it is a good thing. That gives me the chance to stand in front of my book and say on the contrary a real vacation is humanities based. You mentioned the analytical thinking [inaudible] how do you guarantee that is a very good question. How do you know whether someone knows. Even socrates from door to door. But socrates isnt around so my solution to this amazingly difficult problem is to find out how people have done by virtue of studying the humanities five years after theyve gone from ten years after theyve gone we should do something incredibly revolutionary. We should ask them how did they go for you . Now the skill side and put it being accurate and organized and i think those are measurable based on some of the riding that i see when people first come in. Big words seem to be in the mode at this point so there is a part thats measurable but theres a part that isnt so for that part you just ask people. And constantly, based on writing this book its good to hear people tell me about i am now a computer analyst reindell own my own business, i am now and engineered. I took classes in the humanities and college and they made an enormous difference in my life. I still have the books. Maybe its because i talk about im talking about and they wanted bonding and be friends, but i dont think so. I think if you just ask people afterwards, they will tell you and most of what they tell you is really good but sometimes they just get mixed up in the fact college is a wonderful time in life and your young and you meet your wonderful young men and women who are smart and attractive and have a great time. Im pleased to be mixed up in that and get a positive aura out of it. One of the ways and my reading is that your view on students and their relationship, todays students and their relationship with recent technology to the nitze, fossella phones, the ipod, computers, so on and so forth. I think there is a part you talk about the moment when students are gone in the sense they are immediately looking at their phones protecting or calling for some four. I was wondering what you propose in relation to that. In my mind there is a culture that started on this connection that is going to keep going in this connection and i find as a teacher myself we ask them to turn things off in part with the University Offers in a place where we can concentrate and focus on this conversation and not six things at the same time. But on the debtor and when i talk like that to my 28 year old son he says that is an old mans argument which i know where hes coming from. Hes saying i grew up in this kind society where you can do several things at once and in these technologies so on and so forth. I guess i was wondering are there ways that we could meet use of these technologies will make use of them ourselves in ways that wouldnt just be liked we are fighting that and condemning at a actually figuring out a way that they could enhance. Good point. I was in my office the authority and she handheld wireless device in her hand that made a malaise so she just received a text. She looked down and read it in the middle of our conversation and then she inserted. She answered it. And i tried to gather up irony and nonviolence. [laughter] and i said to her this is the first time that has ever happened to me. And she said hmm well, its probably going to happen a lot more in the future. I think that the new technology when they use a kind of buffer against fault or engagement really arent that different from every engagement that we ourselves cultivate. I go back to the business of not being able to stand much reality and i look at my life and i see how much of it is devoted to one form of anesthesia or another. Football was sometimes a transfusion for me. Its an anesthesia. So i take this to be more jumpy. So, you know, it is a matter of being in a dialogue seeing if we can advance to a time that involves clarity come intellectual focus and development, conversation exchange. In terms of using the technology i think that is a great idea and but i think is that i am so grateful that i was born during the age of view rule in part because as my own mind began to fade, my memory began to slowly leak away they bought the second memory i knew it was shakespeare but what play was it . So, i find it quite wonderful. However, in order to use the Technology Effectively you must have a large frame marchand know shakespeare was and when he lived and who was the queen and who was the king. So there is a way in which the enormously enhance the capacity to write more deeply, to teach more effectively come to think with a broad range of association but youve got to have that core of awareness about history, about literature and religion and politics. And if you dont, then the technologies they dont do any organizing for you. They are all over the place, too. If you go with a flashlight or search light of your historic the based education, then these technologies can be absolutely magnificent. But if you go in with a confused mind, they will take that confusion and send it to the third or fourth power. The title i really want and i wont be allowed to have this, it is a pleasing and a remedy. Football is a farmer, an elixir and a remedy. My computer is an elixir and it plays in both. And its got great powers for intellectual life and its got a great pet fall. Its a wonderful thing to be able to engage but just as literature was for many of us. Its maybe less dramatic sports had been for me and other people there are a lot farrakhans the uninteresting to get involved with. So thats what i like to write after a book on the metaphysics of the hang over everything is a farm out on the, football been one and computers being another. One more and then we go. Two more. Okay. I think the case that has been close to me and other areas of life, is that the stories in general or how we want our own identities and individuals and people and the selection that we have our what ultimately keep the peace. So how would you say that we need to move or convince people storytelling and other areas in the science and technology is well. I think that is a fascinating question and its wonderful because ive always been interested in what you might call the metaphysical the validity of storytelling. He speaks brilliantly about what it takes to telling the story. But his implication is that this is an entertaining story. But theres something that seems to me about the structure of the stories. The beginning and middle and end building at the point of crisis and transformation than the working down that gets to the truth of some kind of experience because it is broadly shared. But i still havent read the treatment that tells me what truth its getting and why it is precious as it is one before i stepped into the Science Department i want to crack a question thats been bedeviling me for 20 years. Its a continent question to me is the question of eloquence. We hear something beautifully expressed. Does that mean that there is truth in it . Or could it mean that its a particularly well packaged pack of lies but there is truth and eloquence. But those are questions. Anybody that wants a job for something to do over the summer. Yes, last one. [inaudible] i was just sort of wondering [inaudible] it seems like they were there primarily to learn i came here as an engineering student in the English Department we went on to graduate [inaudible] it seems the problem is far reaching and how [inaudible] obama is reflecting the consensus of the education and he rarely has certain kinds of National Consensus and this is one he hasnt chosen to for no particular reason. But if you go to the Good American high school now it is simply a Conveyor Belt and a factory which students go to acquire credentials and there is probably not many people teaching in the high school but theres a finite High School Teachers out there but there arent really people that say we have a Conveyor Belt here. There are other ways to do it and then when you go to college and is a Conveyor Belt, too. So theres got to be people along the way the war willing to say and other students that have it much better than people that weve their reading glasses at them. They say look theres more to the game than this. Try an english course. See what you think. And there on is just go wide. Degette narrow when you ask a question to which there is no right answer. But then their eyes go wide with pleasure and you hear the greatest thing you can hear as a teacher. We argue about your class all the time when you are not there. Anyway. Thank you. If you want to buy a book you will be permitted to do so. [applause]